J-Walk & Associates, Inc.

Back To Work

Well folks, after a 2-year hiatus, I'm back to writing books.

Today was my first day working on the book revisions for Excel 2010. It took me a while to get into the swing of things, but it was actually kind of fun. Even though there aren't a lot of new features in Excel 2010, I'm doing my best to beef up the old books with new material.

I immediately discovered that the template provided by my publisher (Wiley) just doesn't work in Word 2007 or Word 2010. The template has lots of styles, with VBA macros that make it easy to apply those styles. It's all done in a very interactive toolbar which spawns other toolbars. And as we all know, support for those old toolbars pretty much sucks in Office 2007 (and 2010). So my first task was to install Word 2003. And that's what I'll be using to revise these books.

This is probably a very typical problem. Great new software arrives, but solutions that you've used for years stop working so you can't even use that great new software.

I must say that I like Word 2003 much better than the later versions -- especially the ability to load multiple documents in one window. When working with multiple documents, I really don't like having all of those separate windows cluttering my screen.